Vitalina Varela's reviews
Media reviews
Roger Ebert
Yes 'Vitalina Varela' has some of the festival?s most striking tableaux (a woman on her roof during a windstorm, a church with a dirt floor lit by a scorned sun) but Costa is also endemic of the direction much of world cinema has taken. His deep images, his deliberately confrontational shot lengths, his non-professional cast, his fascination in mixing theology and anthropology; he's aware that they can?t be meaningfully separated. This is practically its own school of filmmaking.
Screen Daily
"Built out of static shots, and long lingering takes, the film is a studious salute to endurance. It?s just that, at times, it asks the same of its audience".
Variety
"'Vitalina Varela' will create animated debate between the uneven camps, and for those less inclined toward Costa?s brand of cinema, only the powerful screen presence of the lead, whose life story this is, saves this punishingly dark work from drowning in its own purposeful opacity".
Indiewire
"Costa's latest vision of Cape Verdean immigrants ? a highlight from this year's Locarno Film Festival ? is another lyrical vision of somber people confronting their past".